A stunning and controversial end to the Japanese Grand Prix launched Sergio Perez into the championship lead as Ferrari and Red Bull remain locked in a wide-open title Formula 1 fight that George Russell has spectacularly slumped out of contention for Mercedes.
Welcome to the 2022 F1 season without Max Verstappen. Sort of.
In reality, Verstappen has obliterated the opposition to wrap up his second drivers’ title with four races to spare. Behind him, one point separates Perez and Charles Leclerc in the fight for second. It’s a great symbol of how close things are once Verstappen’s freakishly good season is discounted.
To reimagine the 2022 season in its entirety without Verstappen would require massive creative licence. For the purpose of the argument we want to make here, we’re applying a simple – and extremely debatable! – process: removing Verstappen from all the results and bumping up everybody else. No muss, no fuss.
This ‘analysis (that’s generous in the extreme) is crude at best but before you dismiss it entirely out of hand, allow us to argue it does in fact serve a couple of purposes.
The first is not about Verstappen himself. It’s a glimpse of the kind of jeopardy that the 2022 season has been missing since very early on. By cutting some corners we end up with a great representation of how Verstappen selfishly destroyed any notion of intrigue in 2022.
Obviously, the Perez/Leclerc fight becomes one for the title without Verstappen around. But there are other sub-plots too, like the fact there would probably have been a smattering of race wins for Russell and Lewis Hamilton.
In fact, Russell’s ultra-consistent season would have had him in title contention until a nightmare double-header across Singapore and Japan.
OUR VERSTAPPEN-LESS 2022 SEASON
| Driver | Points before Singapore | Points after Japan |
| Sergio Perez | 252 | 302 |
| Charles Leclerc | 253 | 289 |
| George Russell | 244 | 250 |
| Carlos Sainz | 216 | 231 |
| Lewis Hamilton | 202 | 218 |
And speaking of events in Asia, the hypothetical scenario outlined at the top of this piece relates to how – if events played out identically, just without Verstappen – the five-second penalty for Leclerc’s final corner transgression in Japan would have handed Perez the win and thrust him into the points lead. Reverse the positions and it’s Leclerc who would lead.
In a championship fight, every event involving the protagonists is heightened. We lost that as 2022 progressed. Even Verstappen’s terrible Singapore weekend had zero significance because there were no tangible consequences beyond one bad race.
Verstappen’s hardly the first elite driver who, with the right means and opportunity, made things boring for the rest of us. But the other purpose this exercise serves is to underline how much of an outlier he has been this year.
“I don’t feel like Red Bull have had a dominant car to have won the championship the way Max won it,” Perez said after Japan.
“He definitely pulled a gear or two compared to anyone else.”
While it may be an odd way of looking at things, imagining the championship without Verstappen really helps illustrate that.
We’d have a totally different season on our hands. It’s been a ‘remove the all-conquering Mercedes and see what the championship looks like’ level of dominance.
Ultimately, in Verstappen’s absence, all three top teams were somehow in close company until a couple of races ago.
Leclerc, Perez and Russell have had very different seasons with weaknesses at different times, manifested in different ways. Sainz and Hamilton have been left slightly further adrift, mainly through particularly unfortunate circumstances.
Perez hasn’t had a particularly unlucky season but with or without Verstappen in the picture he hasn’t been able to exert authority over the others.
He may yet beat Leclerc to second in the championship (and win our fictional, nonsense, Verstappen-less championship!) but the fact is that behind the runaway leader, this has been a very evenly-fought battle between several imperfect contenders.
They have had their good days and their bad days, and that’s shaken out into seasons that are broadly comparable.
Whereas Verstappen has been relentlessly strong, in a way nobody came close to replicating.
